It was surprisingly emotional.
Sixteen months of my life came to an end on Wednesday afternoon at about 4.30, when the Danish gaff-rigged ketch Berthe Marie approached Iona, and I watched from the stern as the last shearwaters arced their way low over the waves and back to Rum. Two more weeks, they will be gone, 8000 miles to Argentina, and that will be that.
Since April last year, I have spent half my waking hours learning about them, following them and trying to understand them. I have spent time on about twenty different islands, most of them uninhabited, in five different countries, and on about thirty different boats. This is to say nothing of the months of research in university libraries, and out in the field, or of a thousand random acts of kindness that have been bestowed upon me on the way.
There have been some extraordinary high points, (possibly none more so than last Saturday evening off the coast of Eigg, when three minke whales breached directly into the thousands of rafting birds we were watching), and some rather low ones, like having an accidental walk-on part in an armed robbery in an Argentine coastal city, whilst I waited fruitlessly for four days for the wind to die down so that I could get out to sea. Another night that I will never forget was spent high up on Hallival, on Rum, applying geo-locators to the legs of birds whilst watching the whole of the Inner Hebrides laid out below us.
Covid threw its various spanners in the works, of course, five months’ worth of them, but it did so in so much a worse way for so many other people that I eventually came to see it as almost an enabler of a different approach, and I think the book will be better for it.
The biggest lessons that I have learned have not been about an individual bird, but rather the extraordinary degree to which the creatures of our bruised planet rely on the scientists, students, policy makers, wardens and volunteers who fight their corner, and just how effective they can be. I spent an inspiring afternoon with a professor in Mar del Plata, for example, who has spent over half his life campaigning to protect the next generation of albatrosses, half a million of whom drown in long line fishing apparatus each year.
Just about every trip I started, I planned to travel ‘dry’, a resolution that generally lasted until the first PhD student took the first bottle of Laphroig out of his or her backpack later that evening, or the warden for the island climbed off the boat and up towards the pub with the irresistible words ‘Shall we?’ On one occasion on a stormy morning in Bantry, I had to buy a round of beers at ten in the morning to encourage a local to point me to the right place on an island fifty miles down the coast.
Two more weeks of work remain till the first draft is finished, even though it won’t see the light of day until next Spring. For a book to be any good, and I’m not claiming that it is, the least that the writer can do is to have the humility to live it, and the grace to love it.
And, in all those parts of the book that take place in the Hebrides, and specifically the Isle of Mull, I have got to know infinitely better the ten year old boy that I was when it all started, and the long-dead grandmother who gifted it all to me in a way that sustained the joy of it for ever. But it took me to stand outside her now empty cottage near Bunessan, and to stare at the tiny residual bits of the architecture of my childhood, for me to fully realise that not only can you move on, but that you have to.
The people come and go, but the rocks remain.
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